The time’s come round again for my annual response to what used to be called the ‘SPaG’ test and is now the GPS.
Below are examples of my thoughts about some of the questions on this year’s paper. For those who are unfamiliar with it, I should point out that this is one of the SAT papers in English ‘maintained’ schools (known as ‘public’ schools in the US) ie schools that are free and ‘maintained’ by the state.
The children who do this test are either 10 or 11 years old.
1
What does the prefix ‘anti’ mean in the word ‘anticlockwise’?
Tick one:
never
opposite
before
without
This is not a ‘grammar’ question. It’s a question about meaning (ie ‘semantics’). Why does this matter? Because lying behind the notion of this kind of ‘grammar’ is a principle to do with ‘accuracy’, particularly in the field of ‘terminology’ ie how we name things. It’s laughable that right from the kick-off in this test, there is a misuse of this category or subject ‘grammar’. It’s possible/ok/great/cunning to argue that by throwing the word ‘prefix’ in here, that’s being ‘grammatical’ on the basis that this question is doing 'morphology' but this question is not really about morphology. It's about the meaning of the prefix and getting that meaning 'right'. But is the 'right answer' right?
The 'correct answer' is, I suppose, ‘opposite’. Now try and substitute ‘opposite’ next to ‘clockwise’, thus: ‘opposite clockwise’. No, it doesn’t work. What the examiners are trying to say (but, for some reason, are unable to say it) is that ‘anti’ in the word ‘anticlockwise’ means ‘opposite to’ or ‘opposite of’ ‘clockwise’; ‘anti’ does not (in this context) mean ‘opposite’.
2 is a question about synonyms.
As I’ve said in previous years, synonyms (so-called) have absolutely nothing to do with ‘grammar’. Again, it’s ‘semantics’ not ‘grammar’. The only reason (I suspect) that synonyms crept into the ‘grammar’ test is because this test is based on ancient ways of talking about language in highly prescriptive ‘Grammars’ (school text books). No modern linguist would talk of ‘synonyms’ as ‘grammar’ and it doesn’t do children any good to tell them that they are.
I’d go further. There is a strong school of thought amongst linguists of all kinds to not waste time talking about ‘synonyms’. That’s because the view is that no word is ‘identical’ to another word, whether that be at the level of sound (phonology), tone or register, use or function within sentences and contexts, and so on. In fact, a much more useful activity for young people is to discuss ‘difference’: why or how is this or that word different from another? How can this or that word, that seems to be ‘similar’ in meaning, be used in ways that are different from each other? For example, why or how is ‘bumpy’ different from ‘uneven’ (the example in this question)? Can something be ‘uneven’ without being ‘bumpy’? Could a surface be ‘uneven’ but not necessarily ‘bumpy’? Yes, there could be pot holes but no bumps!
So, my view is that this is a useless question, a waste of time.
4 RUBRIC ALARM!
The question asks:
‘Tick one box to show whether the sentence is a statement or a command.’
[Two of the sentences are statements. Two of the sentences are commands.]
Forgive me, but it’s possible to read this question in such a way that we should only tick one box! The question talks in the singular about ‘the sentence is’, when in fact the correct answer is that ‘two sentences are…’!
How does rubbish rubric get into exam papers? Usually it’s because the exam isn’t sufficiently checked for ambiguities.
The usual reply by examiners when you point out these ambiguities is to double down and insist that the meaning is obvious. I’d be very interested to know what percentage of children who sat this test only ticked one box. I concede that I may be wrong about this and it was only me who hesitated and wondered if I should ‘tick one box’ or two!
6 Which punctuation mark could be used at the end of the sentence below?
I can’t wait to look after the rabbit for the weekend
a question mark
a comma
an exclamation mark
a colon
By the way, please note that the punctuation systems the examiners have used for this test do not correspond to the punctuation rules that the teachers have to teach in these tests. That’s to say, there are no full stops or commas in that question or any of the others. Why not? Because ‘convention’ (there are no rules on it) says it’s OK to lay out exam questions like this. However, the children aren’t taught this. In other words, as with ads, poetry, and a lot of fiction that the children read, the ‘rules’ aren’t universal rules for writing. They are just rules for what these examiners say is Standard English. In fact, for things like punctuation, there are no longer standardised rules and this very question illustrates this.
So, the standardised rule used to say that we use a full stop for a statement (‘declarative’ in the old terminology) and a question mark for a question (‘interrogative’) and an exclamation mark for an exclamation or a command (imperative).
People might remember a hilarious interview with the then Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, on radio struggling to explain exclamation marks and how they should only be used for exclamations. Gibb floundered about talking about sentences that begin with ‘How’ and ‘What’ as in ‘How nice to see you!’ (not his example) or ‘What a lovely day!’ (not his example). Clearly, (from the evidence on this question) his attempt to lay down the law about exclamation marks has been swept aside. This is a great example of just how arbitrary and flexible some of this stuff is.
Because modern standard and formal writing is full of exclamation marks, this test has had to update itself and catch up with writing that’s been going on for at least two hundred years.
In this case, the speaker seems to be saying something emotional: ‘I can’t wait…’ It is of course perfectly acceptable and appropriate to use an exclamation mark here. And note that the question says ‘could be used’ - which is a rare departure from the usual prescriptive style of this test, based on supposed ‘rules’. We can draw the conclusion then that GPS 2025 has dispensed with the Nick Gibb rule that we should only use exclamation marks for exclamations!
Maybe, Nick should be invited back on to radio to comment on this. Lols.
7
Circle the correct verb forms in each underlined pair to complete the sentences below using Standard English.
We was/were going on a school trip to a concert.
The musicians did/done a sound check before the show.
What’s going on here is (supposedly) the education of children who use non-standard forms. Notice the linkage of the word ‘correct’ with ‘Standard English’. It doesn’t matter how many linguists over decades explain that non-Standard dialects can be ‘correct’ too, these exams persist in only ever linking the word ‘correct’ with ‘Standard’. For example, it would be unthinkable for a test like this to include the opportunity for children to show that they are aware of how the grammar of a non-Standard English works. Anyone reading what I’m saying here, could give some examples of how a non-Standard grammar in their locality works. For London, I might say, for example, that many people say, ‘we was’ and ‘they was’, and say, ‘them people’. There are of course many, many examples of non-Standard ways of speaking English.
The point here is not that our job might be to ‘teach non-Standard’ but that if our job is to teach Standard, to non-Standard speakers, one good way to do it, is to get the children to look at their non-Standard forms (assuming they use them), look at the grammar of these forms (yes, the grammar!) and compare this to the grammar of the Standard forms.
Reducing the matter to ‘correct Standard’ is a misuse of the word ‘correct’ if only for the obvious fact that there are many occasions when the non-Standard version of English is ‘correct’ for that occasion! Listen to a group of footballers talking on TV, or even Lord Sugar. Check out the non-standard forms being used and - for that context - correctly!
There is a fairly obvious matter of class prejudice and even class war going on here, though. The statement being made through the use of that word ‘correct’ is that local, regional and mostly working class forms of speech are ‘not correct’. If this was only as trivial a matter as running in the corridors, it wouldn’t matter. But how we speak is a matter of our identity, personality and social being. If you tell me that my speech is ‘not correct’, you’re actually telling me that I’m ‘not correct’. If it’s about a sociolect ( a group’s way of talking), you’re actually saying that there’s something wrong with the group. This test perpetuates this bit of class snobbery and class war. There are of course hundreds of years of this from the banning of Welsh and Irish, to the beating of children who said ‘ain’t’, and the failing of 1000s of children for using non-Standard forms in their writing. It is a long and dishonourable history being perpetuated right here in this question.
11
Circle the most formal option in each underlined pair below to complete the passage
The basketball was set up/established by a group of friend last year.
They invited/got people who were interested in the game to join.
Now they play/compete in their local league.
First, a general comment. I can’t find anywhere in the government’s guidelines for this test what ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ English is. Why not? Is this something that we are supposed to feel intuitively? How do teachers teach this? It is of course notoriously hard to define and in spite of the view of men in suits who devised and justified this test back in 2011 that ‘grammar has right and wrong answers’, this formal-informal malarkey is not a matter of right and wrong. How we speak is a matter of gauging circumstance and context and appropriateness. It can’t be reduced to this silly binary of formal-informal. A few moments listening to speeches in the House of Commons, for example, and we can hear people switching between formal methods of address, throwing in colloquial jokes, mixing that with legal language, telling stories about constituents, hurling insults and so on.
The question applied to the third of the three sentences in this test reveals mind-numbing ignorance and foolishness. On any dial of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ we might say that ‘play’ and ‘compete’ occupy a similar spot. They mean different things, they do a different job in the sentence. There are no sensible criteria by which we might say, that in the context of this isolated sentence, the word ‘play’ is more or less formal or informal than ‘compete’. Neither word is ‘colloquial’ or ‘slangy’ or ‘overly familiar’. Or, measured against any ‘formal’ context we might think up - a presentation with everyone in suits, a funeral service, a job interview - there is no reason why we might think that one of these two words would be more appropriate to use than the other. The question is a nonsense.
12
This is a question about identifying which sentence starts with an adverbial.
Spotting where ‘adverbials’ are has nothing to do with ‘grammar’. It’s about ‘stylistics’ - the choices we make when deciding ‘position’ in sentences and paragraphs and whole texts. It is an ignorant and foolish claim to say that this is about ‘grammar’. The sentence where we are supposed to spot that it starts with an adverbial is as follows: ‘After dinner, Kal is going to her room.’ There is no grammatical difference between that sentence and this one: ‘Kal is going to her room, after dinner.’
Why this kind of nonsense is foisted on to 10 and 11 year olds is beyond belief. There is no virtue in spending hours and hours talking about ‘adverbials’ and - as they do - claiming some kind of virtue in ‘fronting’ them. This is then imprinted on to children when they write, as they are rewarded for including fronted adverbials in their writing. Absurdly, it helps them achieve the so-called ‘expected levels’. It’s all part of the machinery that has turned writing into a pointless exercise in reproducing structures and ‘positions’ as if this is a measure of ‘good writing’.
Just to spell it out, a decision to do with whether to ‘front’ ‘after dinner’ should be about what ‘feels’ right in relation to what the writer wants to say. There is no objective merit or value in fronting or not fronting. If it was a grammarian who came up with this criterion for writing, this should remind us that grammarians can’t be trusted to inform us as to what is good writing. Apart from anything else, it’s worth remembering that most grammarians only write articles and books about grammar, and these are some of the most laboured, tedious examples of writing that you’ll ever come across. Ask yourself, how many people in the world read or can read academic articles about grammar? This should make us wonder what kind of tail is wagging this dog? Why have we surrendered our understanding of what is ‘good writing’ to people who don’t write the kinds of things that we ask children to write? If we were starting from scratch and thinking about what is ‘good writing’, wouldn’t we go to people who earn their living, entertaining, intriguing, exciting, informing, educating people with their amazing, interesting, and helpful texts, and ask them, ‘how do you do it? Why did you write that piece like that? How do you decide what to write?’
13 is another ‘formal’ question in which we are supposed to say that the sentence ‘Kick off is at 2 pm’ is less formal than ‘The coach has yet to announce the team.’
Wot?!
First: why does that second sentence use the word ‘has’? I have had 11 years of statutory education and 9 years of higher education. I have presented a programme about words and language for BBC Radio 4 for 26 years and I would never say or write the word ‘has’ in that sentence. I would write ‘The coach is yet to announce the team.’ I’m not saying for a moment that my version is more ‘correct’ than the ‘has’ one, other than to say, that ‘has’ usually requires either a past participle or an object to ‘complete’ its sense, as with, say, ‘The coach has jumped’ or ‘The coach has a hat.’ This sentence has neither a past participle or an object. Obvs, guys, if you want to write sentences in a test that don’t obey the ‘rules’ that I was taught, then go ahead. Just don’t pretend that you’re teaching rules that must be obeyed or that ‘grammar’ has ‘right and wrong answers’.
However, I concede that this isn’t the point of the question. The point, as before, is that we are supposed to think that ‘Kick-off is at 2pm’ is not so formal as ‘The coach has yet to announce the team’. Once again, this is arbitrary nonsense. There is no objective criterion by which this can be proved or shown. It’s not even a grammar question. (Yet again!) To be clear, ‘Kick-off is at 2pm’ is written in Standard English, with no slang, no colloquialisms, no contractions, no overly familiar expressions, no regional or class features of accent or dialect. There surely can be no reasonable or sensible explanation as to why 10 and 11 year olds should be asked to make a distinction between these two sentences.
16
Circle the three adjectives in the passage below.
The crumbling castle stood high on the rocky hill. The views over the countryside were glorious.
Aside from anything else, this is a superbly bad bit of writing! The first sentence is overloaded with adjectives and an adverb. The second sentence is hackneyed and dull. How ironic that in a test that is supposed to be about improving children’s writing, we put in front of them examples of rubbish writing. This reminds us that every year examiners sit in rooms and concoct these absurd, artificial sentences that are not written in order to convey meaning but in order to exemplify this or that feature, included purely and only for the sake of scoring children’s knowledge of ‘grammar’. It is the complete opposite of what human beings invented writing for: in order to convey ideas, feelings, thoughts to readers (or to ‘store’ meanings for our use later). It is genuinely meaningless writing.
The next point is that examiners spend a lot of time thinking up ways of tricking children. In an ideal world, this would be illegal. What is the point of forcing children into sitting for several hours doing these things if what we do is try to trick them into getting wrong answers? That’s why the word ‘high’ is in the first of these two sentences. As you know, ‘high’ is most often used as an adjective modifying nouns: ‘high wall’, ‘high mountain’. However, in this sentence, ‘high’ is modifying or ‘qualifying’ the verb ‘stood’ so it’s what the grammarians want us to call an ‘adverb’. In other words, it’s a trick question.
Imagine the self-congratulatory chuckle the examiners had over the way they’ve constructed this question: ‘See how we’ve slotted in ‘high’ into that sentence! How many kids will get that wrong, eh?’ ‘Well done, George. Good one!’
Alternatively, imagine language education which wasn’t about tricking kids but about exploring and investigating language and the choices we make when we speak and write. If we did that, perhaps we wouldn’t end up with rubbish sentences like these. Mind you, the sentence echoes the daft sentences we’re getting children to write now, overloaded with ‘expanded noun phrases’, as if these are good criteria for what makes for ‘good writing’. Absurd.
22
Which sentence uses a comma after a fronted adverbial?
Yes, we’re back with that non-grammatical feature, the fronted adverbial. I’ve seen a lot of comment about fronted adverbials and a lot of people not ‘getting’ it. The example of ‘adverbial’ given here is a subordinate clause of time: ‘When the waitress came over’. This reminds us that adverbials (according to their classification) can be ‘adverbs’, ‘adverbial phrases’ and ‘adverbial clauses’. These are lumped together as ‘adverbials’. (They weren’t called that when I learned this stuff, but that’s what they’re called now.)
Notice also the complication for children when learning this, that the clause ‘When the waitress came over’ has two bits of terminology tagged to it, ‘subordinate clause’ and ‘fronted adverbial’ (or ‘not fronted adverbial’ !). As I sit and write this, it’s clear to me. However, I don’t know how clear that would be for many 10 and 11 year olds. We are asking them to ‘get’ several levels of abstraction at the same time. I taught this SPAG and GPS stuff to my then Year 6 son, so I have a strong sense of when and how it got too abstract for him to understand, and how we fudged it with tricks to do with what these sentences or clauses or phrases looked like. In fact, that’s how my English teacher taught us clauses, when I was 15 and 16 in 1962. The clauses were typified as being ‘of time’ or ‘of concession’ or ‘of condition’ (and others) but because we couldn’t be trusted with that level of abstraction, Mrs Turnbull drew up charts of ‘header words’ like ‘when’, ‘although’ and ‘if’ so that we could spot the clauses properly when it got into the exam. I note that when this stuff was introduced in 2011, I didn’t ever see any consideration of the levels of abstraction required to understand this kind of grammar, matched (or not matched) to the age of child having to study it. It’s like Gove and his pals were expert in what was to be taught but ignorant about child development.
24
This is about spotting and naming a subordinate clause.
Last time I looked at the gov.uk materials on writing, the notes on expected levels marked up a child’s piece of writing on the basis of what grammatical structures the child had used. One of the terms used was ‘subordinate clause’ but the structure wasn’t a subordinate clause! At least, not according to the terminology that I learned. I was taught that a subordinate clause has to have a finite verb in it. The example on gov.uk was what we would have had to call eg an ‘adverbial phrase’ as it had no finite verb in it.
This tells us one of two things: either that this terminology is flexible and changeable - particularly over the period of time I’ve been exposed to it and learned it (more than 65 years) . Or that the people who write the documents on gov.uk don’t know what they’re talking about.
27 is a question about modal verbs.
‘Modality’ is a fascinating subject in itself and in a curriculum not loaded down with the trivia of ‘spotting’ and ‘parsing’ modal verbs, children could have a really useful time looking at how we create a sense of obligation, uncertainty, need, possibility etc with these verbs. One game we can play is to write a sentence with a modal verb in it and then swap it for other modal verbs and talk about what the different meanings are.
However, as far as spotting and parsing are concerned, there’s a problem: grammarians aren’t sure about how many modal verbs there are! The joke here is that at the very moment the control freaks who run this stuff get involved in language, they get unstuck as they try to prescribe what is or is not a given category - here a modal verb. As a game, just ask AI what are the modal verbs in English? The stream of answers that comes up from AI and the various grammar sites, don’t agree on how many we’ve got. So much for the ‘right and wrong answers’ fib! By and large, most lists of modal verbs won’t include the one we all use most of the time: ‘got’ as in ‘I’ve got to go’.
What does this tell us? That this grammar isn’t interested in usage. It’s not interested in how we communicate. It’s interested in its own narrow classifications and categories of what we ‘should’ say and write.
Another example is that English is very flexible with its vocabulary and modality. The verb ‘has’ can do a lot of different things and one of these is ‘modal’. ‘I have to go out now’. ‘have to’ is a modal verb in that context. Even the verb ‘to be’ in some forms of English can be modal: ‘You’re to go to school now’ (‘you are’). And there are others that the grammarians can’t make their minds up about. Of course there are! One of these is ‘dare to’. You’ll find it on some lists and not on others.
The long and short of this is that whenever they ask questions on modal verbs on this GPS test, they nearly always play it safe and choose one that you’ll find on all the lists rather than on some. And they don’t choose complicated ones like ‘I would rather’, which in sense terms is an example of where the whole phrase is ‘modal’ ie would+rather.
29
Which prefix could be added to all three words below to make new words?
[blank] charge
[blank] cycle
[blank] cover
At this point the exam goes into new territory. This is not a question about some language they have put in front of the child but is instead asking the child to come up with a brand new bit of language. It’s akin to the kinds of question that you see on TV quiz shows like ‘Blankety Blank’, ’The Chase’ or ‘The Weakest Link’.
So this isn’t really a question about whether children have memorised a bit of grammar. It’s a question about whether they can rack their brains to find examples from the vocabulary they may (or may not) know. It requires them to zip through the prefixes they know, apply them to the words, in order to see if they’ll fit.
In its own way, it’s a fun game to play - but not under the stress of exam conditions, where it’s quite easy to forget what you actually know. Most examiners don’t give a stuff about the stress of exams, and it is of little interest to them how stress often negates what children know. That’s because exams are about grading children and anything that helps examiners ensure that the right percentage of children fail the exam, proves to the examiners they’ve done a good job designing an exam paper.
46
Circle the verb that is in the subjunctive in the sentence below.
If I were to help, I would start by clearing the tables
Don’t take my word for it, but there is big debate between linguists over whether the subjunctive exists in English. My view is that because it’s so debatable, we shouldn’t be teaching 10 and 11 year olds that it’s not debatable.
If you can speak French, you’ll know that the subjunctive is a fully fledged part of the verb system that can be ‘conjugated’. It is analogous in terms of usefulness to the English modal verb system but instead of being an auxiliary verb, it uses the stem of a verb and has different endings. Linguists looking across several languages are almost embarrassed to call the strange bits of vestigial usage that some have called the subjunctive in English. In this example ‘If I were..’ we have a form and use that is fast becoming obsolete. This fact never seems to bother the GPS examiners. By the way, in some dialects (eg Yorkshire) 'If I were...' would be the standard 'correct' (!) dialect form and not the subjunctive.
However, the point is that some linguists note that the 'if I were' so-called subjunctive, is not performing the same function as, say, the French subjunctive. It’s not, in itself, expressing any extra doubt or obligation or uncertainty than if you used 'was' (as I do in my speech and writing). In other words, it might be what some linguists call a ‘fixed phrase’ where a phrase has survived from the past and stuck as a phrase and, they say, that it’s pointless to try to break it open and apply the grammatical ‘rules’ that are usually applied. We have a lot of these in our idioms and proverbs: ‘Come what may’, ‘Be that as it may’, ‘It wasn’t to be’, ‘Would that I could’ and so on.
By the way, there’s some evidence that the only reason this subjunctive question has to be taught is because Gove said it should. Not even the tame examiners who Gove hired thought it was a good idea. Just ponder on that for a moment: someone with no linguistic training, told a group of linguists that he had hired expressly to put in place a test that was there to test teachers on the false basis that grammar has right and wrong answers, and one of the topics was foisted on children and teachers because this person said it should. That’s the story I heard, anyway.
47
Circle the three determiners in the sentence below.
There are some biscuits in the tin but there are not any chocolate ones.
Are you up to speed with your ‘determiners’? In all the time I was at school and university, we didn’t have determiners! We had definite and indefinite articles. And we had a bunch of what we called adjectives like both, every, each, some, any, few (of), all (of), my, her, your, his, our, their, its… Then we had numbers as in ‘twenty plates’. What did we call them? I don’t remember. Then along came determiners. I gather that the grammarians are not sure about what to call numbers (when used in that way). Some include numbers. Some don’t. Imagine being someone who worries about such things! Lol.
48
Complete the sentence below using the past progressive form of the verb in the box
While we [to talk], to our friend, his phone started ringing.
I can’t resist making this next point: we are asked to teach children this kind of terminology as if such-and-such a word or example IS such-and-such a term. So we hear ourselves saying things like ‘“I am” is the present tense.” In some cases these terms have been around for 100s of years. In other cases though, grammarians decided to change the term and ‘past progressive’ is one of these. In a matter of decades the term has changed from ‘past continuous’ to ‘past progressive’. Why? Who decided this? Where is it argued that ‘past continuous’ is a bad term and ‘past progressive’ is a better term.
In this example, why is it better to say that ‘While we were talking to our friend’ is ‘past progressive’ rather than ‘past continuous’? As it happens I was quite happy with the idea of ‘-ing’ verbs being ‘continuous’ because ‘continuous’ expresses the idea of a process going on, continuing. Meanwhile, I don’t know what ‘progressive’ expresses other than a slightly pompous way of saying that a process is progressing. In other words it’s a fine example of new terminology making things harder not simpler. Hooray.
50
in this question, the children have to turn a verb into the ‘past perfect’ form.
Same point as before: 65 years ago, this tense was called the ‘perfect’, though no one told us what was perfect about it. The ‘simple past’ (as mentioned in another question) we used to call the ‘imperfect’. As I have said, someone or some people grabbed hold of the old terminology and came up with these new terms. The language has stayed the same but the terms have changed. I don’t know what’s been gained by this or what the purpose of it is. I’m not saying this because I’m a conservative about names and that I’m clinging to the old terms for some reason. It’s more that I am bemused by the contrast between the totalitarian nature of a test saying that this or that verb form IS this term when in my head it IS NOT that term! Anyway, it IS now the ‘past perfect’ and I suppose there are some grammarians who think that we are all better off for living in a world where that’s the case. I don’t like attacking academics (mostly because I am one!) but I can’t help feeling that these terminology changes in ‘grammar’ are mostly to keep grammarians in work.
Shall we take bets on which terms that teachers have studiously taught for the last ten years will be called something different in 50 years time? While you’re guessing, here’s a term that I find useful but which has fallen out of use: the ‘sentence adverb’ as with ‘however’ in a sentence like, ‘However, the Prime Minister didn’t like that question and so he didn’t answer it.’ I liked the way ‘sentence adverb’ told you that ‘however’ wasn’t modifying the verb or an adjective but was affecting the whole of the rest of the sentence. Oh well, someone earned their keep by junking it.
—————-
Most of the questions I’ve left out, are what I call trainspotting questions. The grammarians have given names for different types of words and functions. A good deal of this test asks children to spot these names.
Let’s ask why? What is the purpose of 10 and 11 year olds knowing these? Why is it more important for children to know these now than it was 70 years ago when I was that age? We learned them at secondary school not primary school at the same time as we learned other languages. That way we built up a network of terms that helped us move from one language to another. We also learned that different languages use different terms so this freed us from the grip of believing that this is some kind of perfect watertight system.
And so it is, another year goes by with teachers having to spend hours teaching this stuff, purely so that the government can (they think) test teachers’ ability to teach. And yet, what the teachers are being tested for is their ability to teach an out of date, inaccurate chunk of knowledge.
Remember, as I’ve said many times before, this test came in, NOT as a result of educators talking about what knowledge of language would be useful and productive for 10 and 11 year olds to know, but entirely in order to assess teachers (see the Bew Report of 2011). It was based on the fallacy that ‘grammar’ questions have right and wrong answers. It doesn’t. That is an untrue statement.
The sad truth is that I could gather together a group of teachers, linguists and educationists and in a few hours we could devise some activities for children of this age (10 and 11) which would enable them to explore and investigate language-use in ways which would enable them to see that the language they use, hear and read is a remarkable and wonderful tool that humans have devised. We could help them make connections between speaking, listening, reading and writing - according to use, function and audience, and not according to rules drawn up 100s of years ago. We could help children find patterns in language use which they could adopt and adapt, in order for them to find ‘voices’ they can use for themselves. And we could show that neither children or teachers need to be bedevilled with tests in order to do this.
As for the ‘grammar’ that has been foisted on teachers, there are slabs of it that are out of date or inaccurate. One example: the English verb system. It is inaccurate to try to link the verb forms with a time frame. It’s inaccurate to talk of tenses when the verbs need auxiliaries. The term ‘tense’ should work across all languages.
To take these in turn: the ‘tense’ we call the ‘present tense’ can be used as part of talking about the present, past or future. We can talk of past events using this ‘present tense’: historians and football commentators do it very frequently. ‘Henry VIII starts to feel constrained by the requirements of the Pope…’ We can also say, ‘I’m going out tomorrow’. In other words, we can construct a sense of time past or time in the future using the ‘present tense’. Many modern linguists don’t go on pretending it’s a ‘present tense’ and talk instead of ‘time aspect’ and ‘verb forms’.
There’s also a problem with talking of the way we construct future time aspects or some past time aspects using auxiliaries. It’s different from using verb endings as with, say the French future tense. The English use of ‘will’ and ‘shall’ and ‘going to’ express futurity without affecting the verb form: ‘I’ll go’ ‘I shall go’, ‘I’m going to go…’ Lumping these in with the French way of making a future, is not helpful or accurate for people who want to describe what language actually is, as opposed to what they would like it to be.
